Rubrication was one of several steps in the medieval process of manuscript

Manuscript

A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...

 making. Practitioners of rubrication, so-called rubricators, were specialized scribe

Scribe

A scribe is a person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession and helps the city keep track of its records. The profession, previously found in all literate cultures in some form, lost most of its importance and status with the advent of printing...

s who received text from the manuscript's original scribe and supplemented it with additional text in red ink

Ink

Ink is a liquid or paste that contains pigments and/or dyes and is used to color a surface to produce an image, text, or design. Ink is used for drawing and/or writing with a pen, brush, or quill...

 for emphasis. The term rubrication comes from the Latin rubrico, "to color red".

The practice usually entailed the addition of red headings to mark the end of one section of text and the beginning of another. Such headings were sometimes used to introduce the subject of the following section or to declare its purpose and function. Rubrication was used so often in this regard that the term rubric

Rubric (typography)

A rubric is a word or section of text which is traditionally written or printed in red ink to highlight it. The word derives from the , meaning red ochre or red chalk, and originates in Medieval illuminated manuscripts from the 13th century or earlier...

was commonly used as a generic term for headers of any type or color, though it technically referred only to headers to which red ink had been added. In liturgical books such as missal

Missal

A missal is a liturgical book containing all instructions and texts necessary for the celebration of Mass throughout the year.-History:Before the compilation of such books, several books were used when celebrating Mass...

s, red may also be used to give the actions to be performed by the celebrant or others, leading the texts to be read in black. Important feasts in liturgical calendars were also often rubricated, and rubrication can indicate how scribes viewed the importance of different parts of their text.

Rubrication may also be used to emphasize the starting character of a canto

Canto

The canto is a principal form of division in a long poem, especially the epic. The word comes from Italian, meaning "song" or singing. Famous examples of epic poetry which employ the canto division are Lord Byron's Don Juan, Valmiki's Ramayana , Dante's The Divine Comedy , and Ezra Pound's The...

 or other division of text; this was often important because manuscripts often consist of multiple works in a single bound volume. This particular type of rubrication is similar to flourishing

Flourishing

Flourishing is an area of study in the field of positive psychology. Flourishing has been defined as: “to live within an optimal range of human functioning, one that connotes goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience.” Flourishing is the opposite of both pathology and languishing, which are...

, wherein red ink is used to style a leading character with artistic loops and swirls. However, this process is far less elaborate than illumination, in which detailed pictures are incorporated into the manuscript often set in thin sheets of gold

Gold

Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au and an atomic number of 79. Gold is a dense, soft, shiny, malleable and ductile metal. Pure gold has a bright yellow color and luster traditionally considered attractive, which it maintains without oxidizing in air or water. Chemically, gold is a...

 to give the appearance of light

Light

Light or visible light is electromagnetic radiation that is visible to the human eye, and is responsible for the sense of sight. Visible light has wavelength in a range from about 380 nanometres to about 740 nm, with a frequency range of about 405 THz to 790 THz...

 within the text.

Quite commonly the manuscript's initial scribe would provide notes to the rubricator in the form of annotation

Annotation

An annotation is a note that is made while reading any form of text. This may be as simple as underlining or highlighting passages.Annotated bibliographies give descriptions about how each source is useful to an author in constructing a paper or argument...

s made in the margins

Margin (typography)

In typography, a margin is the space that surrounds the content of a page. The margin helps to define where a line of text begins and ends. When a page is justified the text is spread out to be flush with the left and right margins...

 of the text. Such notes were effectively indications to "rubricate here" or "add rubric". In many other cases, the initial scribe also held the position of rubricator, and so he applied rubrication as needed without the use of annotations. This is important, as a scribe's annotations to the rubricator can be used along with codicology

Codicology

Codicology is the study of books as physical objects, especially manuscripts written on parchment in codex form...

 to establish a manuscript's history, or provenance

Provenance

Provenance, from the French provenir, "to come from", refers to the chronology of the ownership or location of an historical object. The term was originally mostly used for works of art, but is now used in similar senses in a wide range of fields, including science and computing...

.

Later medieval practitioners extended the practice of rubrication to include the use of other colors of ink besides red. Most often, alternative colors included blue and green. After the introduction of movable type

Movable type

Movable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document ....

 printing, readers continued to expect rubrication, which might be done by hand, if there were few rubrics to add, or by a separate print using a red-ink form, later the normal method. The "great majority of incunables did not issue from the press in a finished state...hardly any incunable was considered 'finished' by its printer...", suggesting that hand rubrication provided a sense of legitimacy to the efforts of early printers and their works. This fact, the notion that something about hand written rubrication completes a printed work by attributing to it a sense of legitimacy and finality, is further supported by the fact that red ink "was not merely decorative...red's original function was to articulate the text by indicating such parts as headings that were so essential to the function of manuscripts that the printers had to deal with them in some way"

Uses

The title "generally was written in one or more lines that the scribe of the text had left blank to receive the title," showing both the importance of the section and the knowledge one may gain from this process. Often, as mentioned above, the initial scribe of a text often left notes for the rubricator of where rubrication would be necessary, a fact that helps the modern historian learn of the provenance

Provenance

Provenance, from the French provenir, "to come from", refers to the chronology of the ownership or location of an historical object. The term was originally mostly used for works of art, but is now used in similar senses in a wide range of fields, including science and computing...

 of the manuscript. Rubrication affected how later generations read and interpreted a text, and this process helped ensure editorial standardization throughout Western Europe.

The recipe for the red ink is given in Theophilus

Theophilus Presbyter

Theophilus Presbyter is the pseudonymous author or compiler ofa Latin text containing detailed descriptions of various medieval arts, a text commonly known as the Schedula diversarum artium or De diversis artibus , probably first compiled between 1100 and 1120...

' De diversis artibus:

"To prepare white-flake, get some sheets of lead beaten out thin,
place them dry in a hollow piece of wood and pour in some warm
vinegar or urine to cover them. Then, after a month, take off the
cover and remove whatever white there is, and again replace it as
at first. When you have a sufficient amount and you wish to make
red lead from it, grind this flake-white on a stone without water,
then put it in two or three new pots and place it over a burning fire.
You have a slender curved iron rod, fitted at one end in a wooden handle and broad at the top, and with this you can stir and mix this flake-white from time to time. You do this for a long time until the red lead becomes visible."

The process took a long time to complete, but was cheap and used common materials.

External links

• "Encyclopedia of Irish and World Art" cultural-history-of-ireland/making-of-illuminated-manuscripts.html
• "Oxford Reference Online:Companion to the Book"ENTRY.html?entry=t290.e4231&srn=1&ssid=412940726#FIRSTHIT"
• "University of Alberta: Calgary http://www.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/ms-course/course/dcrtn-il.html"